Well I purchased a giant sack of American 2 row on the club group buy, I have a lot of American hops in 4 ounce bags and I’m down to my lasst 7 bottles of barleywine in 6 months.   So lets brew some barleywine!   I’m going to do 10 gallons but space them out a couple of weeks.   I just don’t have the tools to do 10 gallons of barleywine in one day so I’m planning for two brew days.    I’m taking some of the feedback about the hopping in my Harley of Barley beer and applying it hoping to come up with a real gem for the end of 2013.

Update: 7/13/2013  – This beer has been fermenting for about a week.   I’m really happy with the Northern Brewer hops in this guy as they were a nice smelling very ruddy, woody and just pleasing hop to smell.    I have a feeling this guy will be very different than anything else I’ve brewed.  I did forget to add the additional DME until right at the end when I was throwing in my aroma hops so I had to cook the whole thing about another 5 minutes to mix that in.  So some aromatics were likely lost but if it comes out fantastic I’ll repeat that mistake!  Who knows but at 80 IBU this should be the most bitter barleywine ever.   Really will need time to age and mellow I would think.

Update 8/3/2013 – The fermentation appeared to go well but the fermentation apparently dropped out around 40% apparent attenuation. I stopped by Cuban Liquor and picked up a packet of Safale us-05, made a one liter starter and got it chugging real good then pitched it active. After about 24 hours a nice Krausen has formed up and with any luck it should finish. The beer tastes very nice albeit too sweet since it’s only half finished.